Book Review: 'Careless People' by Sarah Churchwell

'The Great Gatsby' owed more than a little to certain crime stories F. Scott Fitzgerald read in the newspapers.

By

R. Clifton Spargo

Feb. 14, 2014 5:54 p.m. ET

The year 1922 was the symbolic pinnacle of the Jazz Age, a constant party, an epoch of carelessness. In his ledger entry for 1922, F. Scott Fitzgerald took tally of his productivity, observing unsparingly, "A bad year. No work." He had lost chunks of 1922 to pottering and retooling a flop of a play called "The Vegetable," which suffered publication, and a miserable staging, in 1923. Fitzgerald also wasted much of his "bad year" behaving badly, squandering his imagination on alcoholic holidays, in endless parties, in flirtations, petty quarrels and occasional brawls. Zelda and Scott spent...